The Sea, the Sea by Iris Murdoch – review | Books | The Guardian Classics corner The Sea, the Sea by Iris Murdoch – review The 1978 Booker prize-winning novel, featuring a theatre director who retires to the coast to write his memoirs, is a rich and textured study of vanity and self-delusion Iris Murdoch in 1978, the year she wrote The Sea, The Sea. Photograph: Jane Bown for the Observer Share on Messenger Close Charles Arrowby, celebrated theatre director, egomaniac and narrator of Iris Murdoch's 1978 Booker prize-winning novel, has retired to a remote Martello tower on the cliffs by the sea – a body of water by turns calm, raging and boasting the occasional, possibly hallucinated, monster. Arrowby is writing his memoirs, and his attempt to chronicle his successful career in the "histrionic arts", both on the boards and off, reveals a character that is part Pooter, part Proust and part Partridge, yet wholly Murdoch. Shruff End, as the atmospheric, oil lamp-lit house is named, is where Arrowby aims to become a hermit and reflect upon his life.

He details his marvellously revolting meals with the lyricism of a gourmand – salivating over Battenberg cake and prunes, and making quirky declarations: "Kipper fillets are arguably better than smoked salmon unless the latter is very good," and suchlike. These domestic pursuits, along with some tantalising recollections from his former life, keep him – and us – entertained for some time. But Arrowby's heart is patently not in the solitary life. "How huge it is, how empty, this great space for which I have been longing all my life," Arrowby writes, adding poignantly, "Still no letters." With nothing to do but "learning to be good", it is inevitable that Arrowby will create some drama even in this isolated spot; and this he does by attempting to draw his former lover Lizzie into his new life while trying to destroy the marriage of his childhood sweetheart, Hartley. Other visitors congregate at his new abode, shedding light on Arrowby's past and present: his Buddhist cousin, James (of whom he has always been profoundly jealous), and various theatrical ex-lovers and ex-friends.

Their relationships reveal the shallows of Arrowby's self-knowledge – as well as his ability to manipulate. Peppered with literary allusions, yet enjoyable on its own terms, the strongest echo in The Sea, The Sea is of Prospero and The Tempest. Murdoch's subtly, blackly humorous digs at human vanity and self-delusion periodically build into waves of hilarity, and Arrowby is a brilliant creation: a deeply textured, intriguing yet unreliable narrator, and one of the finest character studies of the 20th century. Becoming Good Becoming Good THE SEA, THE SEA By Iris Murdoch. his is Iris Murdoch's 19th novel, unusual I'm sure for a serious writer today. Her work keeps its interest, I think, because of its intelligence, a philosophically educated, uninfatuated English moral intelligence with nothing flashy about it. Yet her novels have a lot of flash -- thanks to her quite remarkable powers of invention.

Her stories, including this one, are marked by an uncommon variety and complication of incident; the reader is continually surprised and shocked by the abrupt appearances, disappearances and reappearances of characters, unexpected couplings and uncouplings, sudden shifts into bizarrerie, epiphanies of the spiritual and invasions of the demonic. (The demons are man-made: "We are all potentially demons to each other," writes Charles Arrowby, the narrator of "The Sea, the Sea," after 495 pages of haunting and being haunted.) The first page of "The Sea, the Sea" announces an unusual project: learning to be good, after a life of egoism, art and power. Arrowby is a famous English director-playwright, stage tyrant and lover of stars, now in his 60's; he has dropped everything and retired to a lonely seaside house, there to be washed clean by the cold tides of the "blessed northern sea" in which he swims daily.

His business has been magic and illusion and working his will on others; now this Prospero wishes to drown his book, give up power for quiet days, "change magic into spirit." (Miss Murdoch, defending her own craft, has her theatrical protagonist say about the novelist that "his humble medium is on the side of truth. Whereas . . . dramatists are disgraceful liars unless they are very good.") But the omens aren't good for this effort to switch from spellbinding and pleasing oneself to being good and true. Instead of the affable seals that are supposed to visit his coast, Arrowby sees a horrible sea monster. He is a little too pleased with his own "clever face" for one trying to repudiate cunning and guile; too pleased with his "entirely satisfactory" hairpiece for one who had turned against the lies of art and vanity. He means to live hermit-like, but is set upon by a crowd of visitors, half of whom, he had forgotten, he invited himself -- mostly former actress-mistresses and actors still under his spell. "The theatre is a place of obsession," Arrowby writes.

But his flight from the theater also become an obsession, a mad endeavor to rediscover youth and idealism by recovering his "only pure" love, Hartley, his lost childhood sweetheart who jilted him when he was 20. Now, 40 years later, he stumbles upon her in a nearby village. Hartley is gray, worn and distraught from a married life of ordinary pain -- the ordinary pain Arrowby has always avoided, for he could not "prefer the awful eternal presence of marriage to the magic of meeting and partings." Using Hartley, he is determined to be a husband (though she is already married), and a father by adopting her adopted son. He is determined to be a good man instead of a bully and a liar. Arrowby, made a monster of egoism by his obsession, harries and bullies the reluctant Hartley throughout the inordinate length of this story. In the course of his pursuit of her, he holds her in his house against her will, becomes indirectly responsible or her son's drowning and makes a first move toward killing her husband. Slowly, he gives up his delusion, ceases to exercise power -- Prospero really drowns his book.

And for a moment, under the stars by the sea, he sees ecstatically into "the vast soft interior of the universe." The next morning the seals are there. But that is how art, theatrical, deceptive art, ends things -- "with seals and stars . . . in calm of mind, all passion spent," Arrowby writes in a postscript. Life itself (and the novel in pursuit of life) continues to bump along, scattering all that spiritual radiance, mocking the sacrifice of self, the power of virtue, seeking and finding self-satisfaction. In the end, however, the comedy has come full circle: Arrowby, even with the wisdom he has acquired, begins an affair with an 18-year-old monster of a girl in hot pursuit of a celebrity, however old. "Upon the demon-riding pilgrimage of human life, what next?" he wonders. "The Sea, the Sea" stands or falls on the validity of Arrowby's narrative voice.

Fussy and pedantic like an old man's (he is an old man), though mellower at the end, self-obsessed though trying to see beyond self, the voice of a cold-fish romantic who lies shamelessly to others while trying not to lie to himself, it is still dry and unattractive. The real question is: Is it a genuine voice? Not enough of one, I fear. Arrowby's dryness is really an unconvincing literary device. Miss Murdoch has always been a praiser of life and "contingency" over the artificial constructions and arrangements of mind and art -- and always in her work the coldly constructed predominates over the warm and vital. But in her easier, shorter novels her gift for invention and construction is exploited to create glittering, ironical, quick-moving comedies about English upper-class writers, rich people, psychoanalysts, artists, businessmen, anthropologists, etc. This comedy is lit with the aplomb of true comedy's calm understanding of moral obliquity. But "The Sea, the Sea" tends toward the doughy. There is the genuine weight of obsession in Arrowby's narrative, but also the mere weight of iteration and ingenuity.

Of the other characters only Hartley -- distressed, tired, undistinguished, one whom life has belabored -- is good and she is very, very good. The mouthpiece of the novel, Arrowby's cousin James, is just that -- a mouthpiece. Quotations from Shakespeare, Milton, T.S. Eliot and others, I'm sure, are woven into the text, contributing to the artificiality. But how intelligent Miss Murdoch is; and that's a pleasure. Martin Greenberg, the author of 'The Terror of Art," a study of Kafka, is completing a work on Coleridge and Wordsworth. The Sea, the Sea by Iris Murdoch - Reading Guide - PenguinRandomHouse.com Questions and Topics for Discussion INTRODUCTION “We are all such shocking poseurs, so good at inflating the importance of what we think we value.”—Iris Murdoch, The Sea, The Sea Around this barb of (unheeded) reflection swirls the rich maelstrom of fantasies, plots, delusions, mind games, and awakenings that makes up Iris Murdoch’s popular 1978 Booker Prize-winning novel, The Sea, The Sea.

As both a philosopher and a novelist, Murdoch always concerned herself in some way or another with the struggle to develop moral goodness and the concomitant effort to vanquish obsessive self-regard. In The Sea, The Sea, she dramatizes this characteristic moral concern to great effect on a stage crowded with self-absorbed artistic Londoners out of their element in a small seaside village. As she explores the potent mixture of power, illusion, and self-delusion in retired actor, playwright, and theater director Charles Arrowby, Murdoch weaves a rich tapestry of startling events: old love affairs revive and die again, friendships sour into attempted murder, hallucinations (or are they?) portend ominous happenings, and the drowning embrace of the sea waits restlessly in the background. As Charles negotiates the turbulent swirl of events, an intricate portrait develops of a man bewitched and bewildered by his own powers of self-promotion and manipulation. In an imaginative style at once realist and gothic, modern yet hearkening back to the age of the grand novel, The Sea, The Sea charts a person’s journey toward becoming a virtuous, spiritually mature human being.

Taking up the moral development of the individual in a novel rather than a philosophical tract might strike some as a hazardous project, one that could mar both the clarity of thought so necessary for good philosophy and the narrative enchantment so integral to a good novel. And yet it was precisely in her novels that Murdoch so successfully discussed the vital issues of the moral life. Despite this marriage of philosophy and fiction-writing that is so prominent in her work, she always resisted the label of “philosophical novelist,” refuting any suggestion that her books might be merely anemic shufflings of philosophical positions by consistently delivering vibrant characters and powerfully effective plots in the realist tradition of such great nineteenth-century novelists as Dostoevsky and George Eliot. The Sea, The Sea is no exception in either the profound issues with which it grapples or in the richness of its fictional world. By the time she came to write The Sea, The Sea, Murdoch had already published eighteen novels and several times been short-listed for the Booker Prize.

Concentrating her well-honed talents on the tenacious demon of egotism, The Sea, The Sealays out an absorbing world of magic, illusion, and power—supernatural as well as theatrical, spiritual as well as worldly. Charles, in turning his back on the dazzling world of theater and retreating to a house by the sea to take stock of himself, write his memoir, and make a lasting testament, believes that he is eschewing the vulgar, self-absorbed power plays that constituted his adult life as a director. He believes that he is learning to be good. But self-regard and the manipulation of others are not so easily dispensed with.

His egotism follows him—as do the many people that he has pulled under his spell over the years, such as his ex-lover Rosina, the ferociously glamorous actress whom he stole from Peregrine (her husband and one of Charles’s friends); the mysterious Buddhist cousin, James, who for years served as the linchpin for the elaborate network of envy that Charles carried with him from childhood into adulthood; and Lizzie, another actress and ex-lover whom Charles found “surprisingly easy to leave…when the time came.” Each steps into Murdoch’s dizzying and humorous narrative with a segment of Charles’s past, revealing him to have been a self-absorbed manipulator ignorant of his own motivations. Echoing the prominent place that romantic love and sexual obsession often play in Murdoch’s novels, the greatest obstacle to the self-understanding and maturity that Charles so falteringly strives for proves to be his accidental meeting with his first love, Hartley, who, after her abrupt cessation of their chaste yet intoxicating relationship, became a rather ordinary housewife.

Contrasting the thoughts and motivations of Hartley and her all-too-banally brutal husband Ben with those of Charles and his many neurotic visitors, the novel descends into a whirlpool of opposing wills and thwarted stratagems. With a morbid fascination brought about by Murdoch’s nimble control of this cast of idiosyncratic characters, we watch as serene reflection eludes Charles and he desperately grasps at the unrealistic phantoms spawned by the long lost object of his unconsummated childhood infatuation—leaving many victims in his wake. Throughout the novel, theatrical illusion, Tibetan magic, unconscious projections, supernatural interventions, and overripe fantasies all skew clear perception, distorting the characters’ awareness of events and entangling them in a confused web of self-centered power relations, even as they try to be virtuous. In intricately charting the multifaceted deceptions of Charles Arrowby with stunningly subtle black humor, Murdoch adeptly elaborates on a motif that followed her in her lifelong concern with Good, with Love, and with Freedom: to be good one must transform the personal into the impersonal, one must escape one’s private self and concern oneself with others.

Inspired by Shakespeare’s The Tempest and echoing Prospero’s attempt to transform magic into spirit, The Sea, The Sea brilliantly depicts the risks and self-deceptions of the spiritual life, the precarious and important distinction between imagination and fantasy, and the vital importance of negotiating these dangers. ABOUT IRIS MURDOCH Iris Murdoch (1919-1999) was one of the most acclaimed British writers of the twentieth century. Very prolific, she wrote twenty-six novels, four books of philosophy, five plays, a volume of poetry, a libretto, and numerous essays before developing Alzheimer’s disease in the mid-1990s. Her novels have won many prizes: the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for The Black Prince, the Whitbread Literary Award for Fiction for The Sacred and Profane Love Machine, and the Booker Prize for The Sea, The Sea. She herself was also the recipient of many esteemed awards: Dame of the Order of the British Empire, the Royal Society of Literature’s Companion of Literature award, and the National Arts Club’s (New York) Medal of Honor for Literature.

She was born in Dublin, Ireland, on July 15, 1919, the only child of Anglo-Irish parents. Her father was a bookish civil servant who had served as a cavalry officer during World War I; her mother had trained as an opera singer before marrying. The love of both literature and music instilled in her by her parents proved to be powerful formative influences, and she reportedly began writing at the age of nine. The family moved to London in Iris’s childhood and she grew up in the western suburbs of Hammersmith and Chiswich. The 1940s saw Iris receive a first-class degree in classics from Oxford, briefly become a member of the Communist Party (from which she resigned in disappointment), work in Belgian and Austrian refugee camps for the United Nations Rehabilitation and Relief Program, and befriend Jean-Paul Sartre, on whom she wrote what was to be her first published work, a critical study entitled Sartre: Romantic Rationalist (1953). In 1947 she took up a postgraduate studentship at Cambridge, studying philosophy under none other than Ludwig Wittgenstein.

The fruits of these philosophical encounters went on to form an important part of her fertile talent as a novelist. With three previous novels unpublished, Murdoch made her fiction-writing debut in 1954. Under the Net is a picaresque existentialist adventure set in London and Paris’s Left Bank that displays many of the traits for which her later work is so admired: a fast-paced plot, finely wrought settings, imaginatively developed characters, and a strong philosophical concern with moral issues and ethical crises. Surpassing the somewhat derivative existentialist strictures of this nevertheless stunning debut, Murdoch published almost a novel per year throughout the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s and continued at a slightly less feverish pace throughout the ’80s and early ’90s. With each book, she displayed her unique talent for combining a lively, comic touch in characterization and plot with a serious concern for such profound themes as the nature of goodness and human freedom.

A novelist and philosopher rolled into one, Iris Murdoch declared in her famous essay “Against Dryness” (1961) that literature “has taken over some of the tasks formerly performed by philosophy.” However, she never allowed her novels or her characters to become abstract stand-ins for philosophical viewpoints, asserting in the same essay that the novel should be “a fit house for free characters to live in.” Producing romances such as The Sandcastle (1957), religious fables such as The Bell (1958), and fantasies such as The Unicorn (1963), she ranged widely across genres and settings. A Severed Head (1961)—later made into both a play and a film—takes on Jungian archetypes and Freud’s theories about masculine sexuality, while in The Red and the Green (1965), Murdoch, in her only foray into historical fiction, delved into the 1916 Easter Rising in Dublin. Her calling cards became the intoxicating combination of love, marriage, adultery, sexuality, and religion, as well as the inventive use of gothic elements.

InThe Time of Angels (1966), for instance, the protagonist is an atheist Anglican priest in an impoverished inner-city parish who engages in black magic—and through whom Murdoch explored the central question of the role of morality after the death of God. From the 1970s into the 1990s, international acclaim and recognition coincided with the publication of some of her finest work, including an experimental novel of love gone mad, The Black Prince (1973), her popular and highly esteemed The Sea, The Sea (1978), and a Platonic investigation of morality, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (1992), one of her most acclaimed nonfiction writings. Her last novel, Jackson’s Dilemma (1995), was published just as Alzheimer’s began to take its toll. She died in Oxford on February 8, 1999, survived by her husband, John Bayley. DISCUSSION QUESTIONS Charles’s house, Shruff End, is in many ways a character in its own right.

Intricately described, the house is explicitly referred to as gloomy and cave-like and can in many ways stand as a metaphor for Charles’s own mind. What are some of the ways that events and features in Shruff End indicate Charles’s mental state? Discuss his evocation of Plato’s myth of the cave and fascination with Minn’s Cauldron. What other examples and uses of the trope of the cave punctuate the novel? In a moment of drunken philosophical reverie, James renders the following soliloquy:”Religion is power, it has to be, the power for instance to change oneself, even to destroy oneself. But that is also its bane. The exercise of power is a dangerous delight. . . . The worshipper endows the worshipped object with power, real power not imaginary power. . . . But this power is dreadful stuff. Our lusts and attachments compose our god. And when one attachment is cast off another arises by way of consolation. We never give up a pleasure absolutely, we only barter it for another. All spirituality tends to degenerate into magic, and the use of magic has an automatic nemesis even when the mind has been purified of grosser habits. White magic is black magic.

And a less than perfect meddling in the spiritual world can breed monsters for other people. Demons used for good can hang around and make mischief afterwards. The last achievement is the absolute surrender of magic itself, the end of what you call superstition. Yet how does it happen? Goodness is giving up power and acting upon the world negatively. The good are unimaginable.”Contrast this description of magic and the concept of goodness with Charles’s stated intention at the beginning of the novel to “abjure magic and . . . learn to be good.” Speaking of “some fear of loneliness and death that comes to me out of the sea,” Charles observes that “the sea ages one,” yet he continually presents it as an object of aesthetic appreciation. Contrast Charles’s rich, painterly descriptions of the sea in his writing with the role it plays in the “real world” that the novel presents. How are both the plot and the characters’ thoughts organized by and centered on the figure of the sea? Compare the three female characters—the mundane and muddled Hartley, the demure and clinging Lizzie, and the fierce and implacable Rosina—in their attitudes toward love and their approaches to Charles. Are any of them free? Do they seek freedom?

Compare Murdoch’s depiction of them with her handling of the male characters. Is sexual difference and “the nature of women” a theme in the book? Charles repeatedly and self-consciously draws attention to the diary/ memoir format of his writing, contrasting it to his previous writings, which were “written in water.” In fact his withdrawing to Shruff End to write his memoir provides the very foundation and center of everything that happens in the novel. How does Murdoch use the natural self-absorption of this medium to render a view of Charles that he himself does not have access to? What are other examples of his self-absorption? The specter of demons, fates, and controlling forces are sprinkled throughout the novel. What are some of the examples of these “relentless mechanisms”? What is their significance? Is The Sea, The Sea a fatalistic novel? What examples might counter this assertion? What is the significance of Titian’s Perseus and Andromeda in the novel? How do the painting’s figures relate to specific sets of characters, for instance, Hartley, Ben, and Charles, or Peregrine, Charles, and Rosina?

Discuss the sea monster and its role in the painting and the novel, taking into consideration both its phallic and vaginal manifestations. Life, Charles says, unlike art, “has an irritating way of bumping and limping on, undoing conversions, casting doubts on solutions, and generally illustrating the impossibility of living happily or virtuously ever after.” What conversions are undone, what solutions cast in doubt in the novel? By the end of the novel, has Charles learned anything through his experiences? Is he—or are any of the other characters—happier or more virtuous at the end of the novel than at the beginning? If so, in what way? If not, how has he failed? How does one reconcile Charles’s passionate yearning for Hartley with his appraisal of the married state as “that unimaginable condition of intimacy and mutual bondage”? In light of the fact that love and its reclamation, romantic histories, jealousy, and sexual obsession figure so prominently in the novel, is there an example of a happy couple inThe Sea, The Sea or are all fated to be, in some sense or another, trapped in “the inferno of marriage”?

Echoing the frequent occurrence in modernist fiction of the male hero on a quest, Murdoch often utilizes a central male narrator in her novels—a device that prompts some to accuse her of trying to “write like a man.” In The Sea, The Sea, how does she maintain a distance from her male narrator? What elements of Charles’s circuitous intellectual journalizing does Murdoch employ to undermine his narrative position? Discuss some of the many examples of Charles’s unreliability as a narrator, especially those involving the disparity between his stated intentions and what he actually delivers. James is very prominent in both Charles’s memories and in the plot, taking on many roles in Charles’s mind: spoiled cousin, latent homosexual, Buddhist mystic, patronizing connoisseur, retired general, magical savior, romantic rival, moral conscience, reader of the book of Nature. In light of this plethora of identities, what effect does James have on Charles’s own identity? Can James be considered the “guiding angel” of The Sea, The Sea? Why or why not? The Sea, The Sea - Kindle edition by Iris Murdoch, John Burnside. Literature & Fiction Kindle eBooks @ Amazon.com.

By A Customer on February 23, 2002 Format: Paperback The Sea, The Sea has become one of my top five favorite books and Iris Murdoch one of my favorite authors. In The Sea, The Sea, we meet arrogant, snobbish Charles Arrowby, a retired London theatre director. Charles has recently bought a house by the sea where he hopes to finish his pretentious autobiography. Many things happen, however, to disrupt this enterprise. First, Charles discovers that one of the small town's inhabitants is his very first love, a love who disappeared from his life in his teens. Believing her to symbolize his lost youth and innocence, Charles becomes obsessed with her almost to the point of madness. Iris Murdoch's books are all excellent studies of relationships and The Sea, The Sea is certainly one of her best. In it, the character of Charles lies at the center of a vast network of complex relationships and interpersonal interactions. Much of the novel is an exploration of how we, ourselves, influence what others eventually come to see about people and how they relate to them. Although relationships take center stage in this novel, there is much symbolism and even a little of the supernatural.

The sea is so ever-present in this book that it almost seems to be a character in and of itself. Charles reacts to the sea in many ways, some benign, some not so benign. The sea, itself, is portrayed as something that is untimately not able to be understood or controlled, much as is life. Although this book is passionately moral, it is definitely not a treatise on how to behave in a moral fashion. In fact, many of Murdoch's characters could be said to be anything but "moral. Read more › By D. Cloyce Smith on November 10, 2002 Format: Paperback Verified Purchase The first section of this novel, "Prehistory," seems interminable at times. The British director Charles Arrowby has retired to a drafty old house by the sea to write his memoirs. He begins in diary form, relating his daily regime, detailing his fastidiously prepared meals, recalling with fondness (and condescension) people in his life, dismissing others who have crossed him, and reminiscing about the one "true love" of his life, who inexplicably left him when he was a youth.

With the exception of one or two mysterious incidents (at one point, he thinks he sees a dragon in the sea), so little happens in the first 87 pages that anyone will wonder, why am I reading this? It's a set-up. After this lengthy prologue, people from Arrowby's past begin arriving at his doorstep or in the nearby village, shattering the tranquil atmosphere of his retirement and belying the gist of his memories. As the one character who Arrowby had earlier described as "very attached to me" says in anger: "You're an exploded myth.... You never did anything for mankind, you never did a damn thing for anybody but yourself." The reader quickly realizes that Arrowby is an egotistical boor who, under the guise of "love," wielded power and fear over the people in his life. Then, as the horde of Londoners from his past continue to invade his new home and complicate his life, he unexpectedly runs into his adolescent flame--and he convinces himself that, trapped in a marriage he regards as repulsive, she still has feelings for him. What follows is both hilarious and heart-rending--and often excruciating to read.

Charles Arrowby is not a likeable character; he is, in fact, detestable. And the life he remembers is not how his "friends" recall it. As his cousin asks him, "What is the truth anyway...? Read more › 2 Comments 74 people found this helpful. Was this review helpful to you? Yes No Sending feedback... Thank you for your feedback. Sorry, we failed to record your vote. Please try again By Rosemary C. Cappello on February 24, 2002 Format: Paperback Having recently seen the film Iris, and being disappointed inasmuch as it focused mostly on her personal life as a young woman and on her Alzheimer's as an older woman without featuring information about her many novels, I decided that I'd been remiss in never having read her works. I then proceeded to read The Sea, The Sea. This book is deep as the sea, inasmuch as it is about the mental processes of a not-so-good playwright who manages to become famous. The novel turns out to be quite interesting; in fact, fascinating; though at one point, somewhere around page 100, I felt that I didn't give a whit about it all.

That was temporary. I returned to the book, read the remaining 4/5ths, and found it rewarding. It starts out on an intimate basis, as if you are reading a letter from a friend, and I utterly loved that ploy. Then, it changes; suddenly, all kinds of twists and turns occur, and though the reader has at first seen Charles, the protagonist, as a humorous man who withdraws from society to a home by the sea (I chuckle, for this house on a cliff in rugged terrain is definitely not the haven which a home should be), circumstances plunge him into temporary madness. The word "sea" conjures so many images of all that the sea can be: wild, calm, loving, cruel. Charles gets to see every aspect of the sea's personality, and we get to see every aspect of his. At one point in the book, Charles' madness is hard to take, as we are drawn in to experience it. In other words, since Charles has chosen a craggy environment in his quest for peace, peace is hard to come by. Charles undergoes an epiphany -- in fact, more than one. Read more › Comment 88 people found this helpful.

Was this review helpful to you? Yes No Sending feedback... Thank you for your feedback. Sorry, we failed to record your vote. Please try again The Sea, the Sea – Sarah Churchwell on the making of a monster | Books | The Guardian Rereading The Sea, the Sea – Sarah Churchwell on the making of a monster Iris Murdoch’s flawed protagonists are so often blinkered by their own egotism, but The Sea, the Sea’s Charles Arrowby is a bully to beat all others Morals and magic … Iris Murdoch. Photograph: Daily Mail/REX Shutterstock Saturday 2 April 2016 03.00 EDT Last modified on Tuesday 20 September 2016 05.50 EDT Share on Messenger Close In Iris Murdoch’s novel The Black Prince, a popular writer named Arnold Baffin defends his regular production of books he knows are not as good as he’d like them to be: “Every book is the wreck of a perfect idea. The years pass and one has only one life.

If one has a thing at all one must do it and keep on and on and on trying to do it better.” Character here presumably speaks for author, although one also suspects that poor silly Baffin’s platonic conception of a perfect idea is probably less perfect than he thinks. It’s a good bet that Iris Murdoch ’s perfect ideas were better. A published philosopher whose first book was the first book in English on Jean-Paul Sartre , Murdoch wrote novels of ideas about love, as well as the occasional love letter to ideas. Obsession is everywhere in her fictional landscape, but characters are as likely to be obsessed with art as with sex. Adulteration is the game: nothing remains pure, certainly not fidelity to other people, or to social conventions, even the most deeply held. Her characters are most faithful to their conceptions of themselves, which are almost never shared by those around them. In her essay “The Sublime and the Beautiful Revisited”, Murdoch wrote that the most important thing for a novel to reveal, “not necessarily the only thing, but incomparably the most important thing, is that other people exist”.

It was a point she made repeatedly outside her fiction: “In the moral life the enemy is the fat relentless ego,” as she wrote in “On ‘God’ and ‘Good’”. Iris Murdoch is ‘promiscuous’ while Ted Hughes is ‘nomadic’. Why the double standards? Read more Although Murdoch consistently denied that her fiction explored her philosophical preoccupations, the project of forcing flawed protagonists to see beyond the blinkers of their own egotism defines most if not all of her 26 published novels, among which two of the best are A Severed Head (1961) and The Sea, the Sea (1978). Both are narrated by self-regarding middle-class men with aspirations to aesthetic mastery. Fastidious and complacent, less wise and less kind than they like to think, they find their lives thrown into turmoil by their inability to recognise the agency, and desires, of those around them. These desires are always in part, but never exclusively, sexual: they are also a will to power. “Love is the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real,” Murdoch declared in “The Sublime and the Good”.

“Love, and so art and morals, is the discovery of reality.” Truth is not the same thing as realism, Murdoch tells us again and again: “People lie so, even we old men do,” as the narrator’s cousin tries to tell him in The Sea, the Sea. “Though in a way, if there is art enough it doesn’t matter, since there is another kind of truth in the art.” Murdoch’s novels are not merely cerebral exercises in ideas about moral philosophy, ethics and aesthetics, although those ideas shape her fiction. They are also shot through with the dark energies of occult forces, variously figured as Eros, the id, the unconscious, the repressed, the monstrous, the supernatural, the libidinous: all that the conscious mind cannot comprehend stalks her hapless protagonists, as their precarious fantasies of control are exposed for the delusions they are. Murdoch’s fictional experiments, as admirers such as AS Byatt have written, fuse realism with the mystical, producing a very English magical realism at the point where 19th-century realism meets myth and fable. For Murdoch, artistic form was a temptation and compensation, a remedy for the contingent messiness of life, but also a consolatory falsification.

She wrote that the novel was caught between the “journalistic” and the “crystalline”, the loose baggy monster that Henry James saw in the 19th-century novel, and modernist experiments in controlled, limited artifice. What feels to the characters like the forces of contingency battering away at them is just as likely to be their author’s implacable design, creating ruthless comedies of manners, and various manners of comedy. Around her intricate plotting orbit satires of art and morality, accountability and guilt, ethics and erotics. Murdoch has been compared to James more than once in her interest in the moral consequences of relationships, of romance and society. Her sense of social and psychological satire owes much to his, as when her protagonist in The Sea, the Sea chooses The Wings of the Dove to read, “another story of death and moral smash-up”. But James’s careful social realism is quite alien to Murdoch’s sense of the ludicrous in her plotting, the sheer pleasure she takes in her own designs, while her willingness to tell stories from the viewpoint of her protagonists’ immoral casuistries makes them like reading The Portrait of a Lady from the perspective of Gilbert Osmond.

Pinterest The official trailer for Richard Eyre’s film, Iris (2001) One such figure is the appalling Charles Arrowby, the complacent centre of The Sea, the Sea, which won the Booker prize in 1978. A failed playwright and actor, the tyrannically selfish Charles only found success in the theatre as a director, when he could exert his will over those around him (indeed he announces early on that any director who isn’t dictatorial isn’t doing his job). Charles fancies himself a Prospero, an old sorcerer abjuring a life of power and magic, but Murdoch gradually reveals that his most successful tricks were practised on himself. Charles has retired to a house by the sea, where he intends to write his memoirs. Insisting upon his need for solitude, he is irked when no letters come from his friends, and decides with characteristic high-handedness to summon a former lover, Lizzie, who once played Ariel to his Prospero, to keep house for him.

He treats women as useful labour-saving devices, explaining, for instance, that he never learned to drive as long as he had girlfriends around: “Why keep bitches and bark yourself?” He confesses that he has been accused in the press of being a “power-crazed monster”, a charge of which he sounds slightly proud. Like the narrator of A Severed Head, Charles is convinced of his own tenderheartedness, but Murdoch carefully shows the rage, misogyny and jealousy that fuel his self-absorption. One by one, characters from Charles’s past intrude on his present, demonstrating a persistent sense of autonomy and agency that he finds deeply irritating.

They all inform Charles at various times of precisely what his problem is, but his inability to recognise their accuracy is symptomatic of his failure: “You don’t respect people as people,” Lizzie bluntly informs him early on, “you don’t see them, you’re not really a teacher, you’re a sort of rapacious magician.” Once Charles discovers that his long-lost love Hartley, with whom he has remained obsessed for the 40 years since she left him (he admits with a pride some would consider misplaced), lives with her husband just up the road, he is overwhelmed by the compulsion to reverse the past. He becomes a kind of demented Jay Gatsby , determined to undo the choices of the woman he is certain must still love him, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding. What he calls loyalty, others would call mania – not to mention stalking, breaking and entering, and even kidnapping: when Hartley resists his efforts at rescuing her, Charles simply locks her up.

Murdoch has shared the fate of Plath and Woolf: the drama of her life contends in the public imagination with her work During her captivity Hartley reasonably observes that Charles’s professed adoration for her is actually just rage that she left him: what he has been nursing is not devotion, but a grudge. “It’s resentment really,” she points out, “otherwise you wouldn’t be so unkind.” His response is to tell her that she has forced him into “a position where I have to play the bully, which is the role I detest most of all”. Charles may be the biggest bully in the 20th-century English novel. When he finally realises he shouldn’t have kidnapped Hartley, it is only to conclude that his mistake was in locking her up: it was a strategic error, not a moral transgression.

Charles’s solipsism is universalising, embracing all before it: “What we talked about I will now recount, since some of it is relevant to my situation,” he explains at one point, before adding: “Indeed, now I come to think of it, nearly everything in the world is relevant to my situation.” The question Murdoch leaves the reader with is whether Charles ever undergoes what The Tempest calls a sea change, and finds redemption. Charles believes he does, and some critics have followed suit: but he has rarely been right about himself before. And, tellingly, his “memoir” has become a novel: “So I am writing my life, after all, as a novel! Why not? It was a matter of finding a form, and somehow history, my history, has found the form for me.” Perhaps that’s because everything Charles thought he knew about his world was always his own fiction. He has taken refuge in the fantasy of control that is magical thinking: otherwise known as fiction, making people up. As his cousin James wisely remarks: “We cannot just walk into the cavern and look around.

Most of what we think we know about our minds is pseudo-knowledge.” And at the edge of the known world, there be monsters. Pinterest Murdoch with her husband, John Bayley, in 1997. Photograph: Rob Judges/Rex As a cultural figure, Murdoch has shared something of the posthumous fate of writers such as Sylvia Plath and Virginia Woolf : the drama of her life contends in the public imagination with her own work. Memoirs by her husband, John Bayley , and Richard Eyre’s film Iris, in particular, defined her life around the poles of her defiant insistence on following her sexual desires where they took her, and the later years in which her great mind was shattered by Alzheimer’s . The cerebral image of philosopher-author is first subverted by the erotic exhaustiveness of her life, before the final, tragic twist of the assault by dementia, destroying her at the very source of her power. There is something mythical about such a fate, the terrible black poetry of it, which might almost belong in one of her novels. But her art teaches us to continue to recognise her selfhood, the mystery and irreducibility of it, and to see morality in such an effort.

All of her novels explore the contest between love and art as conduits to truth, and the ways in which contingency contends against form. Does art redeem? Does love? Or do we keep confusing our misunderstandings with metaphysics? Contingency is frightening, as all Murdoch’s characters know, capricious, unpredictable; but it is in the hazards of the fortuitous that life reveals itself. Love is also contingent, unpredictable, hazardous. Good art, Murdoch also said, is “the highest wisest voice of morality, it’s something spiritual – without good art a society dies. It’s like religion really – it’s our best speech and our best understanding – it’s a proof of the greatness and goodness which is in us.” Although Murdoch parses the grammar and traces the limits of love, she never stops believing in its moral force, or the spiritual potential of art. Art is impossible, so is love. And the only possible moral choice is to continue trying to achieve both, knowing that they are impossible. • The Sea, the Sea & A Severed Head by Iris Murdoch has been reissued as an Everyman’s Library Contemporary Classic.

To order a copy for £11.99, go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min. p&p of £1.99. 20 best British and Irish novels of all time What to Read 20 best British and Irish novels of all time Best British novels of all time (clockwise from left): Tom Jones, Middlemarch, Great Expectations and A Dance to the Music of Time 15 April 2014 • 11:00am Tom Jones Henry Fielding (1749) Joyous and irrepressible, bawdy and fast, Fielding’s picaresque adventure is short on moralising over sexual liaisons, and long on a rich depiction of 18th-century life. Ceaselessly engaging and everlastingly fresh.

Emma Jane Austen (1815) Of all Austen’s heroines, Emma Woodhouse is the most beguilingly flawed; and naturally, beneath the comedy of disastrous match-making and snobbery, the narrative has a keen intelligence and finely wrought moral sense that makes even a picnic on Box Hill seem universal. Great Expectations Charles Dickens (1860) All that we associate with Dickens, from the large characters to the sense of social injustice, finds its most perfect expression here: Pip’s journey from blacksmith’s boy to nouveau gentility is an elegy of regret and nostalgia; and London and the windwhipped Thames estuary are unforgettably conjured. What Maisie Knew Henry James (1897) Legal divorce came to England in 1857 and was still a rarity when 40 years later, James’s novel told of a young girl being shuttled between two ghastly separating parents. Bleak, yet perfectly formed.

Middlemarch George Eliot (1874) Eliot brought her formidable acuity to the evocation of a very particular time – the political reforms of 1832 – but she also pioneered a real depth of psychological understanding in her unforgiving depictions of disintegrating love. Virginia Woolf described it as the only English novel “for grown-up people”. Ulysses James Joyce (1922) Or: a day in the life of Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom, as they criss-cross Dublin on June 4, 1904. Every word is pregnant with meaning, every character’s thought conjured with precision, yet it is brilliantly, consistently, laugh-outloud funny. Mrs Dalloway Virginia Woolf (1925) Well-connected Clarissa Dalloway is to give a party later that evening; not far away, Septimus Smith, a victim of shell shock, sits in Regent’s Park, subject to hallucinations. Through their thoughtsWoolf addresses Society and the delicacy of sanity.

Lady Chatterley’s Lover D H Lawrence (1928) The sex scenes and language are now inadvertently hilarious, but none of us were to know this until 1960, when the ban on this novel was lifted. Still startling, there is also another level here to do with landscape, inheritance and war. A Dance to the Music of Time Anthony Powell (first volume, 1951, 12th volume 1975) A fantastically ambitious and panoramic sequence detailing the lives and loves of various interlocking mostly upper middleclass characters across the 20th century, it continues to draw in fresh enthusiasts. I, Claudius Robert Graves (1934) Graves hit a rich seam with this imagining of the lost autobiography of Emperor Claudius. Lethal palace intrigues, poisonings and sex, as well as satisfyingly complex relationships gives ancient Rome a vivid new colour and energy. At Swim-Two-Birds Flann O’Brien (1939) A book within a book within a book, a satirical evocation of 1930s Ireland, in which the characters write about one another, and these various fictional figments gang up on the notional author.

The New Confessions William Boyd (1987) A sprawling picaresque aping the form of Rousseau’s The Confessions, New Confessions follows John James Todd from Edinburgh through the First World War to Berlin, Hollywood and then into exile on an island in the Mediterranean. Surprising, engaging, often very funny, it is also ultimately rather moving. A Clockwork Orange Anthony Burgess (1962) Young Alex loves Beethoven and ultraviolence, but the state thinks it has found a way to scientifically purge him of evil. The real point of the book is the dazzling language – a blend of cockney, Russian and Romany. The Girls of Slender Means Muriel Spark (1963) Set in drab 1945 London, Spark’s genius for conveying the flavour of a time, combined with the collision between light-hearted youth and intimations of a heavier life to come, results in a story with an unusual sweet-sour after-taste. The Sea, The Sea Iris Murdoch (1978) A theatre director takes a house on the coast where he meets his former love and disastrously begins wooing her afresh.

Murdoch juggles philosophy with raw emotions and self-absorption and finds humour in both. Riders Jilly Cooper (1985) One of the greatest of guilty pleasures, Cooper’s febrile Rutshire Chronicles started here: show jumping is a backdrop to the extraordinary sexual dealings of the caddish Rupert Campbell-Black and the wealthy English county set. Pure glitzy class porn, yet still weirdly moving. The Sea John Banville (2005) A masterful exploration of memory, and of loss, Banville’s Booker-winning novel focuses on an art historian reaching back to the seaside years of his childhood, and of the people and experiences and loves that have subsequently shaped the meaning of his life. White Teeth Zadie Smith (2000) The most startling quality of Smith’s precocious debut – a northwest London multiracial multigenerational saga – is the blend of extreme energy and stop-you-in-your-tracks psychological observation. Immigration, the human genome, Kilburn, failed fathers, 1970s pubs and a Nazi too; the genius lies in Smith’s flair for making it all seem so natural, as well as so funny.

Wolf Hall Hilary Mantel (2009) There is the temptation to think of this extraordinary work as populist, even crowd-pleasing. But Mantel’s achievement runs deeper. In fictionalising Thomas Cromwell and the Henrician court, the deadly power struggles and the most tender relationships, Mantel has reinvigorated not just a genre but the English novel as a whole. Tess of the d’Urbevilles Thomas Hardy (1891) There are times when Tess’s ruralWessex has a medieval feel; but Hardy’s tragedy of a wronged country girl is also on another level about the painful onrush of modernity and industrialisation – a foreshadowing of simple purity despoiled by capitalism.

Question: 'The Sea, The Sea' a 1978 novel about a theatre director and his childhood love, was by which authoress
Answer: IRIS MURDOCH